Abstract
Daston and Galison argue that nineteenth-century scientists critiqued Kant’s idealism for excessively valuing the self’s contributions to epistemic claims. They contend that the modern notion of objectivity was defined, in part, as a reaction against the subjectivity of idealism. This paper examines the ethos of critique in idealism, and how it produced more nuanced views of the interrelationships of subjectivity and objectivity than nineteenth-century scientists allowed. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason introduced a tribunal for the investigation of reason’s claims. The virtue Kant validated and valued was epistemic modesty, the restriction of human cognition to appearances. Fichte and Schelling began with a critique of Kant’s critique, a meta-critique, which interrogated the assumptions underlying Kant’s idealism. They emphasized how philosophical reflection introduced the possibility of free self-determination in thinking, while insisting on our limitations as finite beings in the world. They thus extended Kantian critique as an epistemic virtue.
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Notes
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Kant’s terms Objekt and objektive, and Subjekt and subjektive, are readily translated into English. Kant also used the term Gegenstand, commonly translated as object. Some scholars have argued for a systematic difference in Kant’s uses of the terms Objekt and Gegenstand. Henry E. Allison, for example, organized his analysis of the two parts of Transcendental Deduction in the Critique of Pure Reason around the distinction between the objective validity of the categories with respect to objects [Objekte] in a logical sense, and the objective reality of categories with respect to objects [Gegenstände] understood in their applicability to human experience. Although some scholars have taken up Allison’s distinction, it has also been widely criticized on philological grounds, and Allison himself has subsequently admitted that the distinction in Kant’s use of the terms is misleading (Allison 2004, 476 n. 11). The Guyer and Wood translation renders both German terms as object.
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Daston and Galison acknowledge that Kant’s opposition to empiricist philosophy as merely subjective did not lead him to claim reason reveals the essence of things in themselves (2007, 208). But they do not recognize the significance of Kant’s critique of rational metaphysics.
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Fichte’s conception of intellectual intuition thus contrasts with Kant’s idea of an archetypal intellect, for which whatever it thinks exists.
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Beiser goes so far as to categorize Fichte as a pragmatic idealist (Beiser 2002, 218). Zöller, who highlights the duplicity of thinking and willing in Fichte’s philosophical system, nevertheless argues that Fichte foregrounds willing as the primary activity of the I, especially in the later formulations of his Jena Wissenschaftslehre (Zöller 1998, 4, 71–82).
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Page numbers for Schelling’s works are from the Sämmtliche Werke (1856–1861) when included in the editions cited; when an edition does not reference the Sämmtliche Werke, its pagination is given separately.
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Steigerwald, J. (2015). The Ethos of Critique in German Idealism. In: Padovani, F., Richardson, A., Tsou, J. (eds) Objectivity in Science. Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol 310. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14349-1_5
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